Irish emigrants who have travelled to Britain since the 2008 economic crash are better-off and better-educated than the average person in British society, but it was not always like this.
“They’re mostly in the high-earning professions,” said Christopher Kissane, the curator of No Irish Need Apply? – The Economic History of the Irish in England, an exhibition which opened on Tuesday at the Irish Emigration Museum (Epic) in Dublin (running to June 30th).
“There’s been a big shift away from construction and work more traditionally associated with the Irish in England, towards finance and tech, which is reflected in the earnings.”
The 200-year-long story of Irish emigration to Britain told by the exhibition shows that it “took the Irish a very long time to get there, much longer than it did in the United States”.
It has been created by the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science on the back of research by University College Dublin professors Neil Cummins and Cormac Ó Gráda.
Curator Christopher Kissane on his ”No Irish Need Apply? The Economic History of the Irish in England” exhibit at the Epic Museum. Video: Chris Maddaloni
They say that despite two centuries of migration, the fate of those of Irish heritage in Britain “is poorly understood”.
Data technology tools have helped to produce findings that “wouldn’t have been possible in the past”, searching millions of birth, marriage and death records among other files to tell the story of the Irish in Britain.
“We have never had a big-picture economic history of how Irish migrants, or people of an Irish background, had done in England,” said Kissane, adding that the findings were “stark”.
For decades, the Irish existed in England as “an underclass, being on average 50 per cent poorer than the English”, with infant mortality 25 per cent higher until the mid-1950s.
The disadvantages are explained by the fact that until the second World War most Irish emigrants went to the north of England.
“The Irish were the raw material for the Industrial Revolution in England,” said Kissane.
Still from The Irishmen, courtesy of Irish Film Institute
Some got “stuck” in Liverpool or Manchester and there may have been a “kind of self-selection going on with better-off people with some skills getting to America and those who hadn’t didn’t”.
“But, equally, it’s also possible that people just got stuck in the industrial capitalism that marked the mass Irish migration in the 19th century after the Famine, when there was a boom in industrial jobs in the north of England,” he said.
The economic fortunes of the Irish improved after the second World War when new emigrants began to move to London, the English midlands and south.
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“But it still took them a very long time to catch up,” Kissane said.
The exhibition should, he argued, be visited by people with family connections to England and those without to better understand the ties between the islands.
In 1971, there were almost a million Irish-born people in England, equal to a third of the population of the Republic.
Infant mortality was much higher for those with Irish surnames
“For a long period, England was the fifth province in much more than symbolic terms. It literally was bigger than many other provinces,” he said.
“The Irish in Britain need to be part of Ireland’s story, no matter what accent they speak with.”
Raised in Kerry, Kissane said his Luton-born father and one of his brothers came to Ireland in later years, but another brother did not.
“Obviously, they have very different attitudes to life, to culture, to everything. But they still come from an Irish background,” he said.
“When my uncle died last year, my English-living uncle sang The Rocks of Bawn over the grave with an English accent. That is a huge part of the Irish story.”
The three siblings came to Kerry each summer as children, speaking “with their English accents” and did not realise there was a “dividing line” until they visited.
“That’s one thing I hope people take away from this – the sheer numbers who went and how important those ties to Ireland are for so many and for those who have come after them,” he said.
“Just because people of an Irish background in England speak with an English accent doesn’t mean that their connection to Ireland is not still very important. Their story is an important part of Ireland’s story. It needs to be respected, understood.”
The English football team is, he noted, full of people with Irish names, with Irish grandparents and great-grandparents.
“People wouldn’t be giving out about Harry Kane if he was playing for Ireland, now would they?”